"My dearest Helena, I’ve written all this about the new prophet and not a word about yourself, though I’ve been feeling the quivering grip of your hand in mine every moment of the time. The memory of that delicious quarter of an hour in the garden has sweetened the sulphurous air of Alexandria for me, and I’m in a fever to get back. _Smash the Mahdi_, you said, thinking if I didn’t obey my father and yours I should offend both, and so lead to trouble between you and me. But the Consul-General is a just man if he is a hard one, and I should not deserve to be his son if I did not dare to warn him when he was going to do wrong. Neither should I deserve to be loved by the bravest girl alive if I hadn’t the pluck to stand up for the right. "Good-night, sweetheart! It’s two in the morning, the town is as quiet as a desert village, and I’m going to turn in. GORDON. "_P.S._—Forgot to say Ishmael Ameer is to go up to Cairo shortly, so you’ll soon see him for yourself. But Heaven help me! what is to become of Gordon Lord when you’ve once looked on this son of the wilderness? "_P.P.S._—Not an arrest since yesterday!" *CHAPTER XVI* "GENERAL’S HOUSE, "CITADEL, CAIRO. "MY DEAR GORDON,—You’re in for it! In that whispering gallery which people call the East, where everything is known before it happens to happen, rumours without end were coming to Cairo of what you were doing in Alexandria, but nobody in authority believed the half of it until your letters arrived at noon to-day, and now—heigho, for the wind and the rain! "My dear Dad is going about like an old Tom with his tail up, and as for the Consul-General ... whew! (a whistle, your Excellency). "Let me take things in their order, though, so that you may see what has come to pass. I was reading your letter for the third (or was it the thirtieth?) time this afternoon when who should come in but the Princess Nazimah, so I couldn’t resist an impulse to tell her what your son of Hagar had to say on the position of Eastern women, thinking it would gratify her and she would agree. But no, not a bit of it; off she went on the other side, with talk straight out of the harem, showing that the woman of the East isn’t worthy of emancipation and shouldn’t get it—_yet_. "It seems that if the men of the East are ’beasts’ the women are ’creatures.’ Love? They never heard of such a thing. Husband? The word doesn’t exist for them. Not ’_my_ Master’ even! Just ’Master’! Living together like school-girls and loving each other like sisters—think of that, my dear!